Nope. That is not what I am saying. I simply gave you two examples that clearly show that the Tanach goes back far beyond the common era.

I have further shown that the Greek translations (and let's not forget they are translations) are full of errors, as atested to by even the early church fathers and the translators of the King James version.

As for accuracy from ancient days to now -- the quality is amazing -- but given the stringent rules not surprising. Torahs from China to Africa to Europe to America to Israel from 1000 years ago to today are nearly identical. So are fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls (dating back more than 2000 years) to today. From Aish:

Quote:
Maintaining the accuracy of any document as ancient and as large as the Torah is very challenging even under the best of circumstances.

But consider that throughout history, Jewish communities were subject to widespread persecutions and exile. Over the last 2,000 years, Jews have been spread to the four corners of the world, from Yemen to Poland, from Australia to Alaska.

Other historical factors make the accurate transmission of the Torah all the more difficult. For example, the destruction of the Temple 1,900 years ago saw the dissolution of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish central authority which traditionally would unify the Jewish people in case of any disagreements.

Let's investigate the facts as we have them today. If we collect the oldest Torah scrolls and compare them, we can see if any garbling exists, and if so, how much.

How many letters are there in the Torah? 304,805 letters (or approximately 79,000 words).

If you were to guess, how many letters of these 304,805 do you think are in question? (Most people guess anywhere from 25 to 1,000 letters.)

The fact is, that after all the trials and tribulations, communal dislocations and persecutions, only the Yemenite Torah scrolls contain any difference from the rest of world Jewry. For hundreds of years, the Yemenite community was not part of the global checking system, and a total of nine letter-differences are found in their scrolls.

These are all spelling differences. In no case do they change the meaning of the word. For example, how would you spell the word "color?" In America, it's spelled C-O-L-O-R. But in England, it's spelled with a "u," C-O-L-O-U-R.

Such is the nature of the few spelling differences between Torah scrolls today. The results over thousands of years are remarkable!

But how impressive is this compared to other similar documents, such as the Chrstian Bible? (Both books contain approximately the same number of words.)

First of all, which would you expect to be more successful in preserving the accuracy of a text?

The Chrstian Bible. For several reasons.

First, the Christian Bible is about 1,700 years younger than the Torah. Second, the Chrstians haven't gone through nearly as much exile and dislocation as the Jews. Third, Chrstianity has always had a central authority (the Vatican) to ensure the accuracy of their text.

What are the results? The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, a book written to prove the validity of the New Testament, says: " A study of 150 Greek [manuscripts] of the Gospel of Luke has revealed more than 30,000 different readings... It is safe to say that there is not one sentence in the (sic Greek) Testament in which the [manuscript] is wholly uniform."

Other scholars report there are some 200,000 variants in the existing manuscripts of the New Testament, representing about 400 variant readings which cause doubt about textual meaning; 50 of these are of great significance.

The Torah has nine spelling variants -- with absolutely no effect on the meaning of the words. The Chrstian (GT) has over 200,000 variants and in 400 instances the variants change the meaning of the text.

The point of course is not to denigrate Chrstianity. Rather, this comparison demonstrates the remarkable accuracy of the Jewish transmission of Torah.



There has been an unbroken chain of transmission of Torah since it was given to Moses until this very time. There was never a generation since Moshe without Torah. We have the names. We know who did what and when. . . There is a really great article at "Being Jewish" on this subject, but as this post is already getting long I'll not post it here.

Most of the DSS do in fact "match" our modern texts. Those that don't follow the Hebrew (these would be the 4 Greek manuscript fragments that date to around 200 CE), come from cave 4. Cave 4 is where the texts were not preserved carefully in jars indicating they were not considered as important. Archeologists have surmised that they were damaged texts or simply not important and thus weren't stored in jars.

As I said earlier UriYosef is far more versed on this than I. But there is the Nash Papyrus and the Cairo Geniza which contains papyri from an old Synagogue in Cairo, the ancient Torahs from Kaifeng China, etc.

There are scroll fragments from Masada (contemporary with the DSS) and from Wadi Murabit (early 2nd C. CE) that are even closer to the MT than the DSS - virtually identical; thus, proving the antiquity of the MT.


And everything that Sarah tells you, listen to her voice. Genesis, 21:12